opencare: a little bit of context

opencare is a European project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688670.

For most of humanity’s history, care services – which today we call health and social care – were provided by communities: family members, friends and neighbours would check on each other to make sure everyone was fine, keep an eye on each other’s children or elderly parents, even administer simple medical treatments.

Starting from the second half of the 20th century, developed countries switched to systems where the care providers were professionals, working for the government and modern corporations.
This new solution has achieved brilliant results, based on the deployment of scientific knowledge and technology. However, over the past 20 years it has come under growing strain: the demand for professional care (health care, social care, daycare for children, care for elderly people) seems limitless, but the resources our economies allocate to it clearly are not. Additionally, any attempt to rationalise the system and squeeze some extra productivity out of it seems to dehumanise people in need of care, who get treated as batches in a manufacturing process.

What if we could come up with a system that combines the access to modern science and technology of state- and private sector-provided care to the low overhead and human touch of community-provided care?

We are going to attempt to do just that. We are launching opencare, a two-year, 1.6 million euro research project to design and prototype new care services. We will: